No Room at the Inn? How Occupy Won Over Religion

Religion is the means by which many imagine and work for a world more just than this one. Last year, Wall Street’s Trinity Church refused to shelter the movement; this year, churches and Occupiers are sharing a very different kind of Advent season.

A year ago around this time, Occupy Wall Street was celebrating
Advent—the season when Christians anticipate the birth of Jesus at
Christmas. In front of Trinity Church, right at the top of Wall Street
along Broadway, Occupiers set up a little model tent with the statuettes
of a nativity scene inside: Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child in a
manger, surrounded by animals. In the back, an angel held a tiny
cardboard sign with a verse from Luke’s Gospel: “There was no room for
them in the inn.”

The reason for these activists’ interest in the
liturgical calendar, of course, was the movement’s ongoing effort to
convince Trinity to start acting less like a real estate corporation and
more like a church, and to let the movement use a vacant property that
Trinity owns.

“Occupy Sandy has been miraculous for us, really. They are doing exactly what Christ preached.”

A year later, even as a resilient few continue their 24-hour vigil on
the sidewalk outside Trinity, churches and Occupiers are having a very
different kind of Advent season together. Finding room in churches is no
longer a problem for the movement.

The day after Hurricane Sandy struck New
York in late October, Occupiers hustled to organize a massive popular
relief effort, and Occupy Sandy came into being. By circumstance and
necessity, it has mostly taken place in churches; they are the large
public spaces available in affected areas, and they were the people
willing to open their doors. Two churches on high ground in Brooklyn
became organizing hubs, and others in the Rockaways, Coney Island,
Staten Island, and Red Hook became depots for getting supplies and
support to devastated neighborhoods. To make this possible, Occupiers
have had to win the locals’ trust—by helping clean up the damaged
churches and by showing their determination to help those whom the
state-sponsored relief effort was leaving behind. When the time for
worship services came around, they’d cleared the supplies off the pews.

“Occupy Sandy has been miraculous for us, really,” said Bob Dennis,
parish manager at St. Margaret Mary, a Catholic church in Staten Island.
“They are doing exactly what Christ preached.” Before this, the police
and firemen living in his neighborhood hadn’t had much good to say about
Occupy Wall Street, but that has changed completely.

Religious leaders are organizing tours to show off the Occupy Sandy
relief efforts of which they’ve been a part, and they’re speaking out
against the failures of city, state, and federal government.
Congregations are getting to know Occupiers one on one by working
together in a relief effort that every day—as the profiteering
developers draw nearer—is growing into an act of resistance.

The dream of creating a
Tahrir-sized rupture in this country persists ... But what would be the outcome?

The religious groups jumped at the chance to help. Occupy Faith
organized an event in New York to celebrate the Rolling Jubilee’s
launch. Occupy Catholics (of which I am a part) took the opportunity to
reclaim the Catholic concepts of jubilee and usury for the present
economic crisis and released a statement in support of the Rolling
Jubilee that has been signed by Catholics across the country.

The Rolling Jubilee idea has been hugely successful, raising more
money more quickly than anyone anticipated—around $10 million in debt
is poised to be abolished. But now Strike Debt, too, has turned its
attention to working with those affected by the hurricane. On Dec. 2,
the group published “Shouldering the Costs,” a report on the
proliferation of debt in the aftermath of Sandy. The document was
released with an event at—where else?—a church in Staten Island.

This newfound access to religious real estate is not merely a
convenience for this movement; it has implications that a lot of people
probably aren’t even thinking about yet. Occupy Wall Street has learned
from the Egyptian Revolution before, and now, even if by accident, it is
doing so again.

While Tahrir Square was still full of tents and tanks, and Hosni
Mubarak was still in power, the editors of Adbusters magazine were
already imagining a “Million Man March on Wall Street,” the idea that
led to what would become their July 13, 2011, call to #occupywallstreet.

Every time I step foot in a megachurch, it strikes me how they
put radicals in the United States to shame. These churches organize
real, life-giving mutual aid as the basis of an independent political
discourse and power base.

More than a year after the occupation at Zuccotti Park began, though,
and nearly two years after crowds first filled Tahrir, neither revolt
very much resembles its origins. The Egyptian Revolution, first provoked
by tech-savvy young activists, has now been hijacked as a coup for the
Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative religious party; its only viable
challenger is none other than Mubarak’s ancient regime, minus only
Mubarak himself. Occupy, meanwhile, has lost its encampments and,
despite whatever evidence there is to the contrary, most of its enemies
in power deem it no longer a threat.

Among many U.S. activists even today, the dream of creating a
Tahrir-sized rupture in this country persists—of finally drawing
enough people into the streets and causing enough trouble to make Wall
Street cower. But what if something on the scale of Tahrir really were
to happen in the United States? What would be the outcome?

I was thinking of this question recently while on an unrelated
reporting mission at a massive evangelical Christian megachurch near the
Rocky Mountains. Several thousand (mostly white, upper-middle-class)
people were there that day, of all ages. They had come back after Sunday
morning services for an afternoon series of talks on philosophy—far
more people than attend your average Occupy action.

Religion is the means by which many imagine
and work for a world more just than this one.

Every time I step foot in one of these places, it strikes me how they
put radicals in the United States to shame. These churches organize
real, life-giving mutual aid as the basis of an independent political
discourse and power base. Church membership is far larger, for instance,
than that of unions in this country.

If there were a sudden, Tahrir-like popular uprising right now, with
riots in all the cities and so forth, I can’t help but think that it
would be organizations like the church I went to that would come out
taking power in the end, even more so than they already do—just as the
Islamists have in Egypt.

If the idea of occupying symbolic public space was the Egyptians’
first lesson for Occupy Wall Street, this is the second: Win religion
over before it beats you out.

Through religion, again and again, people in the United States have
organized for power. Religion is also the means by which many imagine
and work for a world more just than this one. Just about every
successful popular movement in U.S. history has had to recognize this,
from the American Revolution to labor, and from civil rights to today’s
campaigners for marriage equality—and now Occupy.

When I stop by the Occupy Sandy hub near my house—the Episcopal Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew—and join the mayhem of volunteers
carrying boxes this way and that, and poke my head into the upper room
full of laptops and organizers around a long table, and see Occupiers in
line for communion at Sunday services, I keep thinking of how
Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program ends. The 12th step is where you
cap off all the self-involved inner work you’ve been doing, and get over
yourself for a bit, and heal yourself by helping someone else.

Anyone who has been around Occupy Wall Street during the year since
its eviction from Zuccotti Park knows it has been in need of healing.
Whether through flood-soaked churches, or on the debt market, this is
how the Occupy movement has always been at its best, and its most
exciting, and its most necessary: When it shows people how to build
their own power, and to strengthen their own communities, this movement
finds itself.

Interested?

There’s a biblical precedent for forgiveness—of debt. Why churches are
standing by students on one of the Bible’s most surprising social
principles.

Thomas Gokey is one of the creators of Occupy’s Rolling Jubilee, which
is preparing to purchase and cancel $9 million of ordinary people’s
medical debt. Here, he speaks about the project’s origins, methods, and
future.

In 2003, Iraqi townspeople, having just lost their hospital in U.S. air
strikes, saved the lives of three wounded U.S. peacemakers. Seven years
later, the Americans returned—to thank them.

Nathan Schneider is the editor of Waging Nonviolence, where this article originally appeared.